School vouchers offer the only path to success for inner-city blacks.

One of the more startling aspects to our current political
situation is how conservatives have come to accept Soviet levels of
support for Democrats as normal and natural for various minorities.
What other group votes 99% for one political party no matter
what they do? Yet Republicans don't even seriously make the
case that changing sides would be in the personal best interests of
individual black voters.

Thus far, we've seen how conservative policies regarding
illegal immigration - that is, ending it and sending the illegals home
- would directly benefit black workers whose jobs have been
taken by illegals willing to work "off the books" for unAmerican low
wages.
In this article, we'll see how Democratic educational
"policies" have crippled the best hope of advancement for black
Americans, and indeed anyone who's not a child of privilege.

Black Heroes and Education

The importance of education is nothing new, and was once
widely honored in the community of American blacks. Booker T.
Washington was once cited in every American history textbook, and his
story ought to be an inspiration to all Americans regardless of color.

Born into slavery, Mr. Washington was freed by the Civil War
at an early age, but that constituted little more than freedom to
starve. He was provided with no education, no assistance, no
governmental help in any way.

That didn't stop him; his autobiography Up
from Slavery details how his mother pushed him
to learn to read, and then how he managed to obtain something
resembling an education by his own efforts and hard work.
Eventually, he founded Tuskeegee Institute in Alabama as a
black teachers college - that is, a college with the primary purpose of
training black people how to teach other blacks. Today, it's
Tuskeegee University.

Washington was so dedicated to the pursuit of education that
he started his school with next to nothing, in an abandoned church and
shack. He grew the college's facilities by having the
students work on the building; nothing like learning construction by doing construction!
His emphasis on academics in no way minimized the dignity of
manual labor:

No race can prosper till it learns there is as much dignity
in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

Today, there are quite a few black Americans in high and
well-paid positions; but what about the vast majority of every race who
will never go to Harvard or star on TV? Washington felt
that the education and success of ordinary people was even more
valuable than having a few marquee names:

The Negro has the right to study law, but success will come
to
the race sooner if it produces intelligent, thrifty farmers and
mechanics, to support the lawyers.

Privileged blacks are welcomed in our elite institutions, but
all
too many others are trapped in worthless public schools where they're
lucky if they learn to read. Booker T. Washington would be
horrified.

And he wouldn't blame the white man, either, much less
Republicans. The past few years have shown an extremely
sordid
side to the longstanding Democrat alliance with teachers' unions - or
would have done, if the media had felt it worthwhile to report.

Democrat Racism and Bigotry

One
of the unsung successes of the Bush administration was a school voucher
program that allowed poor black children in Washington, DC the
opportunity to attend decent private schools alongside their wealthier
white peers. The Democrats and unions fought this tooth and
nail,
but for a few years the program was under way - long enough to become a
proven success despite the efforts of the Obama administration the
hide the truth.

Washington,
DC is majority black, and its local governance is both mostly black and
exclusively Democrat. There aren't any conservatives or
Republicans around to be
bogeymen. The failing public school system is entirely the
fault
of Democrats; the destruction of the successful voucher system is
entirely the responsibility of Democrats.

So why can't
Republicans make this argument? The black residents of
Washington, DC care about their children, at least some of them do; a
fair few of them angrily protested the Obama administration's
nefarious actions.
Shouldn't this be an opportunity to make common cause with
black
people in an issue that goes right to the heart of their own lives and
those of their kids?

It doesn't have to be limited to Washington,
DC either. All across America, inner-city schools are famed
for
incompetence, violence, and vastly wasteful expense; they're also
largely occupied by minorities. Why can't conservatives
strongly
and powerfully offer the conservative solution of school vouchers, now
proven to work specifically with the poorest and least privileged black
children?

You might say, "Vouchers have been part of the
Republican platform for years, for all the good it did with minority
voters" True - but has anyone ever
bothered to tell
black voters why school voucher systems matters to them, in practical
languge they can understand? As Roland Martin pointed out
in
the first article in this series, Republicans hardly ever appear in
black media or even try to make the case for their solutions, thus
leaving black opinions to be formed exclusively by the hard-left
mainstream media.

There is a powerful story to be told about how
Republican policies can provably help black children's lives.
The
media will never tell it, so those policies will never see the light of
day unless Republicans make sure that they do.

Education is
perhaps the most fundamental way conservatism can help inner-city
minorities, but it's not even the most obvious one. That
would be
in crime and law enforcement - and there again, Republican policies are
the greatest story never told. We'll take a look in the next
article in this series.

The real problem is Santa Claus. He is the present day slave master. Conservative talk falls on deaf ears when the dinner bell rings and Santa is paying for it. Simply said, the republicans compromised their way and reached across the aisle one too many times and now it is too late.